Entertainment

Annalise Keating Is Becoming a Prosecutor

by Alanna Bennett

She plays defense attorney Annalise Keating in the Shonda Rhimes-produced, Peter Nowalk-created How To Get Away With Murder and now Viola Davis will bring the prosecution side to TV. Apparently, Davis is producing a legal drama about Kym Worthy, a Detroit prosecutor that the Detroit Free Press writes is "famous in metro Detroit for her tough, tenacious work."

Davis championing this series could be seen as a product of the nice ripple effect of Shonda Rhimes. It goes like this: Rhimes worked with Nowalk on Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, Nowalk created a show for Shondaland and booked Davis as the lead, and Davis then gains enough TV cache to bring her own projects to the small screen. It is, after all, a reliable Rhimes staple to use a real-life powerful woman as the inspiration for your television drama.

TV in general is no stranger to the legal drama, of course. There's The Good Wife earning praise on the regular, and this new project will be written by Jason Wilborn, one of the writers and co-producers for Damages. There's no indication that this particular series is actually connected to Shondaland, though Worthy's work definitely sounds — pardon the wordplay — worthy of its own show. As Deadline puts it:

Worthy became the second African-American to serve as a county prosecutor in Michigan when she was appointed as chief prosecutor of Wayne County in 2004. She is known for a number of high-profile cases, like filing charges against Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and her campaign to clear a massive backlog of 11,000 unprocessed rape test kits in Detroit.

Now that sounds like a woman I want to follow through sweeps week.